


II. Loyal to the Living

by remnantof



Series: One For The Road [2]
Category: Destiny (Video Games)
Genre: Coda, Destiny: House of Wolves DLC, Exes in forced proximity, Fighting Kink, Grief/Mourning, M/M, POV Original Character, Post-Destiny 2: Forsaken DLC, Relationship Problems, Sexual Tension, Story within a Story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-21
Updated: 2019-05-21
Packaged: 2020-03-09 05:01:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,733
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18910081
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/remnantof/pseuds/remnantof
Summary: When you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.  On the first anniversary of Cayde's death, still recovering from loss of allies and family, Cael and Lux recount the tale of hunting Taniks to two very different audiences.They both leave out the part where they hadn't seen the other in six years.





	II. Loyal to the Living

**Author's Note:**

> Selena and Idris are also characters conceived by [Comptine](https://archiveofourown.org/users/comptine). This story was more recently written, and another is in the works that takes us back a year after the Taniks fight. 
> 
> The single page [cheat sheet](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1T1JuXa73hQ_B8kbRkhruZjzXKhMlO6zHkILD8JA0Aqg/edit?usp=sharing) for these characters has been updated to account for things in this story. The tl;dr is that Cael and Lux are married by the time of Forsaken; Lux and Cas hunt Uldren and only one of them comes home, and this is a frame for the Taniks Coda that makes up most of the story.

> _We're dying of thirst so we feast on each other_  
>  _The sea is still our violent mother_  
>  _The blood round here pours down like water_  
>  _Each wave a lamb lead to the slaughter_  
>  _And like children that she just can’t teach_  
>  _We break, and break, and break_  
>  _And break ourselves upon the beach_
> 
> — Florence Welch

I.

“One for the road,” Cael murmurs, pinching his pulse between the nails of his thumb and forefinger. He’s just starting to chew the last of Idris’ carrot sticks when the door is knocked, precisely — and precisely on time. His sense of the apartment shifts before the creak of a single board, the knowledge of his family and home inscribed to its dust; he always knows, when Idris is awake, when Lux is home. Abandoning the counter, his movement through the apartment does nothing to disturb its silence — he can’t imagine the guest that would send Idris careening around a corner. Perhaps —

It doesn’t matter; they both know who isn’t at the door.

Idris rarely flurries into activity for anything. Lux, on a good day, might point to Cael’s deliberate affect as the source. Cael, on a bad day, might point to the molasses bearing Lux carries home — but only recently to Lux’s face. Only recently with the weight of belief. 

There are times to be slow, defensive. Times to test the aching tooth with a prodding tongue; and times to leave it the fuck alone. Cael isn’t sure what tonight is — the city prodding a wound, the city starting to close it. It’s whatever Lux needs it to be, so long as he sleeps it off and has dinner with them tomorrow. 

“Are you sure it’s alright,” he asks, pressing the door shut behind Selena. He hangs her coat next to his own, deep red beside deep blue, smoothing hand and arm down the central fold — leaning on the door behind it. These days, it isn’t aching feet, long nights, withdrawal. He eats, he sleeps. He makes sure a three and thirty-five year old do the same. He does things that are small on paper, but writ larger inside his body: groceries, lunches, making sure Rhea doesn’t go home alone in a black car. Reading aloud, making up stories for Idris — trying to stimulate a brain none of them quite understand. Picking up enough toys and laundry to keep Idris from hurting himself as he makes run of the apartment, giving up on the rest. By the time he sits down at his desk, the lines of his research go blurry, and he’s passed enough of it off that Ikora can’t accuse him of holding back the security and progress of a city, worn out from — _domestic priorities._

He promised he wouldn’t doom them, chasing dragons. He never promised he’d amount to much beyond it.

Failing to turn and look at her only prompts Selena to hug him from behind — lifting him, he suspects, to test how heavy he isn’t. He leans his head back against her collar, tilting his gaze to the curve of her cheek. Held until he can feel her heartbeat settle at his back, until his breathing adjusts in time with her own.

“I had it on the calendar,” she says, setting him down. Her arms stay around him, her body reverses its arc. Cael lifts a hand to her hair and takes her weight, right hand to the right side of her face; right cheek to the left. He feels her say: “I knew you’d ask.”

“That doesn’t mean you have to.” Tonight isn’t just about him — isn’t just about Lux. Her father must —

He has the sense not to mention Zavala to anyone, tonight.

Selena squeezes him, kisses his cheek. “I didn’t put you fussing half the night away on the agenda. Shouldn’t you go find him?”

“Not yet; if he’s where I think he is, I’ll need a very timely entrance.”

And the energy to make it. Cael smooths the folds of her coat again, picks up the sleeve of his own. Holds it like a hand in the dim hall, contemplating its weight on his body. September is cold in the city, but it might not be worth it.

Selena stands at his back, watching him weigh the task of putting on his coat against a chill he might not even feel. Her mouth curls at one side; she smooths it out with her skirts, embroidered hems touching the backs of his knees. The sound of her footsteps turns him, leads him back to his own kitchen. “I’ll make us some tea,” she says, already picking up the kettle. And that is when Idris appears — sleepy, but inexorable. Mumbling for milk tea and tugging on Cael’s sleeve, filling the rest of the doorway at his side.

“Hey buddy,” he says, giving Idris two fingers to hold instead. “Fancy seeing you here.”

Idris fixes him with one eye, insouciant under his first few curls. They both know who Cael is, and who he isn’t.

Cael leads him into the kitchen on his lifting hand, pulling and aiming him at the table on its arc. “Best get a third cup.”

-

Idris lets them get through the first pot in relative silence, drinking his own tea at a small plastic table, pouring the dregs into the embroidered mouths of his toys. The stuffed banana, half his size, is reigning favorite: one corner well-worn around the stitching where a small hand is often clutched; a patch of drool-flattened faux-fur. Selena always seems to thrive on the little actions that drain Cael throughout the day, finding things to tidy, food to make. She has a restlessness Cael wishes he could bottle, put in the cups of coffee and bowls of simple cereal he sets in front of Lux each morning.

It isn’t what Lux needs, but it’s something he once had. Cael would go back to those days — Lux itching to be back in the field, running from things in the city — just to escape the shocking stillness of his grief. He doesn’t need Cayde, to tell him what to do. He doesn’t need Castor to anchor him to sense.

He’s just learning it slower than the rest of them.

Selena puts down her cup, watches Cael watch Idris while his tea goes lukewarm in his hand. “He’s very resilient,” she says; and Cael knows she doesn’t mean Lux, except for how she knows Cael is thinking of him.

He nods to Idris anyway, dipping his head to sip at his tea. “We try to spare him what we can, but he’s sensitive. Smart,” he amends, flicking his eyes back to Selena. He doesn’t quite want to use the word _powerful_ , for his toddler. Sensitive is how he explained it to Lux, when they outlined the rules of the house. Rules for fights, rules for work, rules for anguish. Rules meant to be broken, when it hurts too much to pack up an aching heart away from the place and people who soothe it — and he wishes Lux knew that better, that he could come home on his own, tonight. 

Wishes they were better at this, without wishing that there was no grief. He daren’t ask the universe for such a thing, knowing it might answer. Ikora has his word, and his heart beats the refusal to regret.

Stubborn — that’s the family name, that’s the legacy. Two feet of it has abandoned his sleepy tea-party and come to clamber into his lap. Idris tips Cael’s chin back, opening his arms to save the cup and saucer, with the upward push of a stuffed and embroidered banana stem. Cael tilts his eyes to share a look with Selena, adding his cup to the strew of tea and its instruments on the table between them. There’s something portentous about it — not the leaves at their bottoms, but the scatter of cups between pages, pencils, silverware. A battlefield, a crude facsimile of the Vanguard table, where Lux is himself for hours of the day, and Cael is not always allowed to follow.

“Spades,” Idris asks, sharpening all of Cael’s thoughts and aiming his attention.

“Your father,” Cael corrects, brows a wry twist for the nickname, “who is both legally your father and — not-legally named Lux, is seeing a few people after work while he waits on me. It’s date night.” 

Idris, still climbing him, has to fight the density of his own toy. Selena’s eyes gleam over her freshly poured cup, watching Cael placidly endure, neither helping nor hindering Idris’ determined shift. Eventually the toddler gets both hands on Cael’s shoulders, clutching the seams of his sweater, and butts his head against Cael’s chin. Idris mutters _ow_ , but has long possessed the strength of character not to burst into tears for every bump and scrape. 

“Isn’t,” he declares, lifting his head to stare Cael down. 

Cael flits a look over his thin hairline, checking for a bruise. “No, it isn’t.” While he refuses to elaborate, this sliver of truth seems to appease Idris, who finally twists, stabs Cael’s thighs with sharp little heels, and settles with his back to Cael’s chest. One arm slings around his banana to hold it close; Idris picks up Cael’s napkin, inserting a corner into his mouth. The portent of the scattered table resolves in Idris’ muffled demand: “Story.”

“Which story,” Cael sighs, eyes finding Selena’s across the table. He knows the price of a calm exit when he hears it, for all that Idris is very often calm. Tonight is different — Lux out late, Cael leaving, with the city wound tight around the apartment. With Idris’ mood dogging him after scraps of truth, it won’t be an old Corsair tale or Cael’s poor grasp of Awoken myths. It won’t be Cael and Selena, fighting the dragon.

“Tanicks,” Idris says, over-pronouncing it in a way Cael hopes he never grows out of. There’s something satisfying, maybe even true — Idris likes to grab onto the deeper truths, chew on them like napkins — in butchering and misrepresenting the old bogeyman of the barracks.

“You told him that one,” Selena asks; the arch of her brow is the arch of their personal history, escalating steadily after that point. Lucky, that Idris didn’t want to hear the one about the dragon. 

“ _A version_ of it.”

“Tanicks,” Idris repeats, rolling the name and the napkin in his lips. Selena can’t quite match the adroit posture of a sleepy child, settling her seat and her eyebrows with her own interest. With a sigh and a flick of his gaze, she’s nodding, getting up to put the kettle back on. Cael breathes deep, his kitchen a home for hours at a time. He daren’t waste it.

“This is the story of the spider who tried to steal the moon, and the knight — “

“Spades.”

“Yes, Spades. Spades and Swords.” Idris holds up three fingers for the card, his purple fist the heart their hilts rise from; Cael covers it, curls his own fingers to close them. He doesn’t need the reminder. He doesn’t need a deck of cards or Idris’ empathy, to know Lux’s heart. 

_He doesn’t know any better than you, how to ask for things._

Cael knows, now, who he met on that ascendant shore. He hasn’t returned with any new advice, and in the months after — Cael is relieved, finding no echoes of Cayde or Castor on the beach. Which of them would he even tell, what good would it do? The space can only serve Cael, and it would break too many promises to conjure the dead.

Selena’s hand is over his, when his mind wanders back. Even Idris doesn’t complain, when Cael loses a thread of conversation, stares intently at the space just beyond his own nose. It’s hard to tell if Idris is just sympathetic, for a three year old, or picking up the worst of Cael’s silence. He’d be a sponge at this age regardless of his abilities, and Cael knows — it isn’t entirely respectful, to make a fairy tale of the dead. To make heroic the ugly work of his years in the field. But Lux’s hours are long, and the simplicity of being alive still wears on him. But Cael is exhausted by proxy, and he has to find words to fill every day. He has to talk to their son, and sometimes — sometimes their son is the only one he can talk to.

Selena squeezes his hand, and Idris’ by proximity, before taking up the seat beside them.

If it can’t be Lux, picking up his hand to tell him it’s going to be okay, he’s glad it’s her. Lifting all three hands to his face, he kisses her first knuckle; lets her slip free to card her fingers through his hair. Threes, for better or worse: strength given simplicity and shape. Cael picks up his tea, drinks. 

“The knight had every intention of hunting the beast alone, but a great enchantress — “ 

“‘Kora,” Idris mumbles through the napkin.

 _“A great enchantress_ saw him in her magic mirror, and sent her apprentice to his aid.” Looking down at Idris brooks no immediate interruption, and he kisses the crown of his head, feeling Selena’s hand come to rest on his own. He lets the moment lull, Idris’ warmth against his chest, Selena’s softly crackling energy against his scalp. “The knight was skilled to be sure, but too close to this fight — for the spider had slain his lord, many years before.”

The napkin separates from Idris’ teeth with a soft click of spit. Cael holds. “Skip this, with Spades.”

Selena’s hand moves down his hair, gathers it at the back of his neck. “I do. Someday you’ll understand why; it wouldn’t make sense if I told you.” Only honesty can put Idris off a question, when there is no full answer to give. Cael hopes it isn’t soon, holding his son between his chest and what will become the story’s setpieces on the table. Cael hopes _a version_ of the truth will continue to be enough, the way he hopes Lux will continue to come home from the Tower, and time will one day close every wound.

He knows it won’t; knows Idris will learn.

He hopes Lux isn’t the reason.

-

“What was the Warlock doing there,” Carys asks, turning her knife thrice more at the hilt; the point wears its hole deeper into the table, cheap formica and cork one big coaster over the aluminum. There’s a snake carved in the corner under her drink, a call-sign in the other. Vidal’s got the bloodstain — the furniture in his Hunters’ favorite dive is sturdy enough to survive the city’s fall, but light enough to pick up in a fight.

That might be Lux’s blood, so many years old it’s gone black, the pores of the material showing through. As he wets his lips and throat on the frothy edge of his beer, Vidal tips his chin at Carys, rolls his eyes: “They were partners.” 

Like she should know it; he lays his head on his hand and tips his eyes back to Lux, sullen swagger all through him. To be young, and that confident despite being wrong. 

To be confident in his bond with Cael, on the basis of a ring.

Lux snorts into his beer. “Not at the time.” Carys turns her knife, revealing her middle finger down its blade, Vidal tries to ward it off with a half-hearted raise of his hand. On a different night, in a different time, Lux would tell him — half-hearted does not a woman endear. Tonight, he hunches over his drink, clocks the shoulders and faces swivelling toward their table. There are more people listening than the pair buying his drinks, and he’s telling a piece of it most their age won’t already know.

Gather ‘round, young Hunters. It was a hell of a tale, when Cayde would tell it — but Cayde didn’t live this one. He’d just liked to give it a flourish, pull up the photo of him and Lux at Lux’s wedding toward the end. 

Far be it from Lux, to take away the man’s credit for his marriage. “It wasn’t long after that,” he promises, shrugging off a year as he downs his drink. One of the Hunters turned out to their table lifts two fingers, buying him another. Lux lets the warmth of it sit in his chest, not yet spread to his mind, and nods his thanks. “Cael got us the tip just as Variks was sending his favorite little team from the Outpost. He’d been on-site, cleaning up Wolves on Luna. Now, I assumed he reported it to Ikora on principle, and she felt it wasn’t Hunter business anymore — Taniks too close to Hive secrets, and all.”

“But you don’t think that now,” his new audience asks, wiping foam from her mouth with the back of her hand. Carys pauses her knife, looking over one shoulder to appraise the source of the voice, maybe even its insight. Tongue to incisor, Lux nods, doesn’t smile at Vidal.

Sometimes full-hearted can’t endear you either.

“Taniks was a mercenary, assassin at best. I think he just wanted to test himself on whatever survived after Crota.” And pick off the Guardians out there to sift through the rubble. He understands Ikora far better, these days; Cael hadn’t been in the field more than a year, and she’d been testing his curiosity with Hive artifacts. Neither of them had needed to be out there alone, with Taniks on the prowl, and he doubts she carries pictures from the wedding in her Ghost. 

Lux drifts out on the thought, even as his fingers dig into the soft cork of the table. A little purchase, an anchor — maybe it doesn’t tear him open, to think about Cayde goading Ikora into one dance at his wedding. But Cayde isn’t the only guest he has to remember.

Carys lifts her knife, the metal catching light. That’s all Lux sees — the flash of it — before it completes the flip and sticks into the table between his fingers. Bless her; when he looks up, their new friend certainly seems impressed. “So it was business, for him?”

“Makes sense.”

“Warlocks,” Vidal agrees, rolling his head on his shoulders for a better look at her.

When he has their attention again, Lux shakes his head. A hand deposits another pint at his elbow; the person he murmurs his thanks to scrapes out a seat and settles in. He understands them better: Ikora a year ago, rigid with grief and rage. Ikora hours ago, telling him to go to his Hunters. 

Cael, seven years ago, kicking him in the jaw. Cael, a week ago, asking to be one of the things Lux still got out of bed for.

He’d been in his first set of armor — shiny leather, completely unadorned — when he’d followed Lux into the Hellmouth.

“Taniks was personal for everyone.”

  


* * *

II.

Hubris had no place on Luna, after The Great Disaster — but Hunters still set their feet to its porous soil. Walk softly, carry a big gun; Lux had landed with singular intent, and it didn’t require Taniks caught by surprise. Epsilon simply wanted the task done.

What Lux would do for Andal, Epsilon would do for his Ghost.

The lunar winds made paths in the dust, made song in what should have been silence. What the Traveler might have made of Earth’s moon, the Hive had given it an atmosphere, thin and clear as it was. There were stories back home, Guardians driven mad by moonsong — air passing through bones in its core and whispering of the Dark. They weren’t Lux’s kind of stories; his sparrow was more than loud enough to drown out a dying worm.

Not loud enough, for Epsilon’s voice patching through his helmet. _“Incoming transmission; Hunter Vanguard.”_

“Already closing in, Cayde.”

“Good to hear, kid. Got you some help for the fight..”

“I don’t need — “ Epsilon, in a rare slice of impatience, cut Lux’s mic.

“Alright, _Ikora_ got you some help for the fight. She’s had a Warlock on the Hellmouth for a few cycles, they’re meeting you at the Gatehouse.”

Lux ducked low over his sparrow, spreading the considerable target of his body; eerie green flared across its polished shell, the protected feeds; Acolytes taking pot-shots at a lone Guardian. He wondered how the Warlock was faring, what their trajectory might be to the Hellmouth’s entrance. “Is this Warlock how you got the tip that Taniks landed?”

Were they to be instrumental, or a hindrance?

“Maybe,” Cayde affirmed, the same tone he slipped into when he was losing at cards. Lux dared not stop under fire, but he banked out on a wider arc, tempted, but — Epsilon was right. They didn’t have time for Lux’s protests, or Cayde’s apology. “Listen, you’re not going to like — “

“As long as Taniks dies today, I’ll be fine.”

The line crackles, moonsong or Epsilon’s internal rattling. Cayde’s silences don’t speak, they just leave something to the imagination. Cayde, looking for a lie. Cayde, looking at his own mistakes. “Suit yourself, kid. Varik’s got a full team on the way, but they’re coming from the Reef. Try to honor the buddy system in the meantime.”

Were it anyone but Cayde, implying he couldn’t do this alone — Ikora simply wouldn’t care, and Lux could imagine her telling her Warlock to pull out, until Cayde let slip that a single Hunter might be heading in, might be out for Taniks' rust-red skull. It wasn’t what Cayde didn’t say; it’s what he did. This was the best backup Lux was going to get, and he’d do well to take it. _“Pikes incoming,”_ Epsilon murmured; Lux rolled with his sparrow, off the narrow track and into an ocean of rocks, worn flat into cresting points. His own weight dropped him onto the first slope, but the sparrow itself was light enough, he could ride the waves with some extra heat. 

Behind him, shots aimed too high on the slopes, and faded as the Pikes tore their hulls on the rock. He knew his sparrow; knew this track of Luna. Whispers from the tunnels or no, nobody got out of Lunar patrols after Crota.

“Who do you think it is,” Lux asked, relishing the strain of muscle along his entire body, when he pulled the sparrow over the last crest and turned it along the new track. 

It took Epsilon a moment to divert attention from the map. _“How many Warlocks do you know. By name.”_

“You really want to talk about this now, Ep?”

_“I do not want to talk about it at all. Rendezvous in three minutes, forty-two seconds, counting.”_

And Epsilon would count them, set a ticking in Lux’s head to deny distraction. Distraction wasn’t the thing to worry about, on a mission like this. The target was the distraction: Ikora might have sent her operative to make sure important crystals weren’t destroyed by either side, big-picture bullshit Lux couldn’t spare his attention for. They’d keep up, or they wouldn’t; Lux aimed down the path and narrowed the propulsion tract, letting speed pare him back down to purpose. 

No compromises; no distractions.

Epsilon’s voice rippled against interference, as his sparrow broke sound to close the gap; Lux cut sideways with a skid, tucking them under a lip of white stone. _“Callsign Janus approaching.”_

“Janus? Why is that familiar?”

He expected the hum and scream of another sparrow approaching, for a ship to briefly block the stars — not for a voice to answer. Violet light inverted the space, a vertical mouth opening in a crack of stone. The Warlock slipping through appeared upside-down, putting a long black boot on the ground from a refraction of their shoulder. Lux made out a slim frame, black armor, pleating in the coat that obscured the body’s silhouette — but he recognized the voice, when he shook his head to clear it. Void jumps always made him sick.

“Roman god of beginnings and endings,” Cael said, as if his hands were skimming one of his books, as if they were sitting on his decrepit couch. As if he had stepped out of time, not just space, and picked up the gun he was using to scan their perimeter. “He had two faces.”

Lux took a deep breath. 

This would happen, today.

Cael _would_ base a callsign on his cat.

Lux dropped the tint on his visor, not to get a better look, but to let Cael see his face. He had only the one, to carry his darkly circled eyes, his disbelief. Cayde was right: he didn’t like this. “Which one is it today?” He had only known two sides of the man, and briefly — open or closed, hot or cold, nothing about Cael had seemed ready for a fight. Not unless he could pluck the life off a man with his wallet.

Void user; he probably could.

Cael’s helmet was a dome of pure black, held in a carbon filigree that sloped along his jaw. What the years looked like on his face, on his frame, wasn’t something Lux got to know. Closed and cold it was; Cael leveled the gun with his chest, as if to fulfill the phantom pain tearing through it. As if he, with his stark silhouette, wasn’t the bullet. 

His aim shifted slightly; Epsilon murmured when the shot passed between Lux’s helmet and the stone lip, dropping an Acolyte as it crested their line of sight.

Cael cocked the rifle, straight along his black lapel. “Eyes up, Guardian.”

-

“There’s a Shrieker over the door,” Cael warned, rolling to one side when they leapt over cover. Hard violet beams swarmed out of the open carapace, choosing and tracking the larger target. Silence from Lux was no surprise, but he’d learn to listen — Cael dug his hands into the Void and pulled, asserting himself between Lux and the trio of bolts. Asserting himself over the Void tracking them through the space. When he pushed into the air, floating on an arc to put him atop a standing stone, they moved to follow, striking it instead.

“Neat trick,” Lux finally said, using the Shrieker’s split focus to unload his cannon into it. Cael drifted backward, drawing the final shots, and went down into another rift to leave them skidding dirt. “Do they not let your lot off planet until they can come back with all their pieces.”

Piko, sitting in that void below his ribs, warbled her confusion for the tone. Cael didn't stop to explain it to her, flattening himself to another stone and asking her to scan the area. “I've known how to blink since I was fifteen,” he answered.

Good enough with the Void to defy time and space; not good enough to ignore Lux, putting on an armor of taunts.

The Gatehouse used to swarm with Thrall, Acolytes behind every stone, Knights taking heavy steps along the first level while Wizards patrolled the floors below. Piko found only four targets approaching; Cael grit a boot to the rubble and slung the rifle over his shoulder, a hand ready on the hilt of his sword, but not yet drawing it. If he was going to let Lux taunt and ignore him in turns, he could stand back and watch him demolish quick-footed Acolytes with — a broken Vandal spear.

The Void was a neat trick; Cael still tilted his head, maintaining sight around the flip of Lux’s cloak, watching the bulk of him demolish four chitinous aliens with a stick and surprising speed.

He couldn’t see Lux’s face, when he looked back over his shoulder, gave the spear an unnecessary twirl. 

Well: as long as they were both showing off. Cael drew the thin sword from its sheath, aiming it behind him with both hands steady at his hip. Lux drew his cannon in his free hand, and led them in.

“It was almost disappointing,” he tells Selena, Idris turned into his chest to clutch one hand in his collar. It stretches, exposing him to the warm air of the kitchen; he moves one hand to cover Idris’, bracketing him with one arm. “The knight and apprentice liked a good fight, too young to realize it would only get harder, the deeper they delved into the spider's lair.”

Lux had been a flash and furl of red, making weapons of anything he could put his hands on: at one point, he’d chucked the shoulder-piece of an Acolyte at an oncoming Thrall. Cael kept him in his periphery, had Piko divert all function to tracking him: the Void would know his targets as they surged up the ramp, ducked around pillars. It was hungry for them. It moved Cael like a shadow, drank from the bodies on the end of his sword. Later told, he would say that he moved, that he harnessed the Void to great ends — but anyone familiar with the Void would know the truth of its give and take.

It mostly took.

Cael sent a bolt over the rail, a violet flare fighting the low green light along the spiraling ramp. It found no life on which to pull; the Hive had sent all it had, or all it was willing, up to the door. 

“I wonder what it would take to drop the walkway. Thrall aren't really known for their vertical leap.”

A question unrelated to the mission at hand, though he imagined Lux would ignore it regardless. They hadn't spoken since the amphitheater; Lux was slinging a canvas-wrapped weapon down from his shoulders, his gauntlets practiced on the straps. It had been six years since the month they’d spent, less in the other's orbit than trapped on a collision course. The kind of force needed to collapse Hive structures, centuries old. The kind of force that might never exist between them again.

There was something, in Lux's silence, but six years and a month — Cael didn't know him in armor any better than he knew Ikora, or Cayde. 

He hadn't been paying attention, as a rule.

They were paying attention now. Cael watched Lux fit the barrel of his rifle to the base: a tawny colored relic, most notable for its size. Assembled and set to Lux's boot, it ended higher than his hairline. Seven solid feet of firepower; Cael wondered if it was strategy or compromise. A slower weapon for a slower descent. An interlude of silence in which to rest. Lux seemed, at the very least, to accept that his second shadow had some teeth.

It didn't shorten his strides, on the walk down; Cael made no effort to lengthen his own. He watched the line of Lux's back, intersected by the width of his shoulders. Intersected slant by the new length of his focus and fury. Cael knew, without being told, that he could go in with sword and sidearm drawn, and he wouldn't need to worry about Lux showing off with a stick.

Lux wouldn't need to worry about him either.

Another antechamber opened from the hall, some of the path winding the walls of the vertical tunnel, some suspended from multiple heavy chains. There was something to be said, the way their design echoed across planes, across alien sensibility — but no time to say it. Lux made for the hanging bridge, covered by its chitinous columns, and Cael ran the length of the ramp to close with the oncoming Knights. 

Lux, slipped from view, narrowed in Cael’s mind to the slight rock of his shots through hard, segmented bodies. The still moments in the humid air, that told him to hold until that body rocked with impact. Everything narrowed, in the scream of blade against blade; the metal meat of the Earth against mounted claw. It was in his training, if not his nature, to bend to superior strength. Move with instead of against, side-step the heavy blow to drive the blade down; he leapt onto the first Knight’s straightened elbow and drove the sword into the hinge of skull and shoulder, hilt pressed with both hands and his chest. He could convert the Void into strength, into energy, if only he sent something to it in turn. With a twist, Cael dragged the blade free. Faint, green gas left the fissure, draining the phosphorus light from a hard shell.

He rolled into the wall, a second Knight swinging as the first collapsed. It moved to crush him with a heavy shield, its own weight — and he had seconds to kick from the wall before it fell on top of him. The shield burned away, slanted to hold its corpse. Lux, never quite forgotten, had asserted himself with covering fire.

One to one, for this stretch of kills. They fell into a pattern along the rise; Cael closed when a Knight turned to fire on the hanging nest, Lux fired when Cael drew the front of their shields. At the last target, despite no one but their Ghosts keeping true count — Cael kicked off the floor, off the wall, his landing foot shoving the Knight’s shield down into the ground. His blade was a moment behind, swinging the same arc, when Lux’s voice crackled over the comm.

“How’s Calliope been treating you?”

Deeper than the instinct to roll with a punch, was the way his body locked for her name. Everything narrowed further, sharper; he’d locked eyes with two of the Knight’s when it reached up and fit one hand, in its entirety, over his head. 

He could barely hear Piko’s teakettle scream, winding up with the pressure testing his helmet. There was a rush of blood, an absolute chill. For a moment, he defied the thin atmosphere, the dank fumes of the deep tunnel. He defied everything but his early training, and it would be Epsilon’s guess, who notched this kill. When Lux’s bullet struck the Knight’s skull, it shattered completely. The arm stuck out, fixed to Cael’s head; broke off from the collapsing frame with glittering frost.

“Cael — “

The Void was very few things, described with too many words. Nothing could do justice to its calm, cold ocean, broken only by eels and edifice. None of it permanent, none of it with as much meaning as the emptiness between. Some Guardians would preach a lack of fear, in one’s dealings with it. 

Cael took his fear and fury into the breach, made them the knife with which he cut the universe, and left them behind in the depths. When he stepped onto the lip of Lux’s vantage, it was hilt-first, driving the momentum of the vacuum into his jaw. Button found, pressed, perhaps deserved — but it had escaped Cael’s predictions, dodging out of Lux’s shots, and Lux would never act, never speak, without Cael’s reaction.

If they hadn’t known it then; he felt certain of it now.

The rifle slanted out of Lux’s hands with the blow, sending him after it before he moved to defend himself. Cael dogged the distraction right into Lux’s boot. The kick sent him back toward the opening, he dropped his sword to catch both hands on a chiseled edge. Swinging his feet back, he kicked off the outside of the column, pulled with both hands to drive himself back in. By the time Lux stowed his rifle and pulled a knife, Cael was a vicious cartwheel across the floor, taking the cut to his knee to drive his heel into Lux’s other cheek. The filter of his helmet skewed across his jaw, exposing the pull and crack of muscle along his neck. Not enough to bring Epsilon to the fray, but enough to raise one hand, righting it.

Putting his foot down, Cael let himself flinch along the wound, fold down to pick up his sword. Lux’s bulk behind a knife was a match for Cael’s speed with a sword, and his strength was greater — but Cael had the length of his blade to draw that momentum down. They were both in light armor and a tight space, and this was too personal for firearms — Cael could only hope to land enough blows to Lux’s head, disorient him, to an end that his howling impulse couldn’t name. As Lux drove down the blade, Cael twisted, putting out his shoulder to clip on Lux’s brow.

The blow shook down his arm; Lux brought his other hand up, punching Cael in the collar. He gave up the sword a second time, smashing his helmet down on the exposed inside of Lux’s elbow.

It was, somehow, the logical conclusion of the last time they were in a room together. Cael had clung to the walls, retreated behind a closed door. Was this what would have happened, if he had come back to find Lux still there? If Lux had ripped up the note and told him to go fuck himself?

Eels; edifice; emptiness.

The fight was draining out of him, when Lux kicked him back into a corner, leaving his foot in Cael’s abdomen to pin him. He still held the knife, hilt-first. Cael refused to believe he’d been the only one out for blood, with it running down the inside of his boot. With Lux having said a name he shouldn’t know. 

They were still showing off, baring all of their teeth. 

Cael could understand it better, gulping new air against his aching diaphragm. He wanted to drag Lux over the lip of the nest, fall to the end of this tunnel, trapped in his arms. He wanted Lux to just stab him, if it might make this easier. He dug his hands into Lux’s ankle, knowing he couldn’t hold his weight for long on that bad leg; Lux flipped the knife in his hand, ready to cut himself free. Whatever he’d thought of Cael at the entrance, he’d know now: they’d made a decent weapon of the boy he’d barely known.

They’d started well before their meeting.

Ikora had asked for strength, to justify his existence within her ranks. The city asked for his existence in her ranks, to justify his existence at all. Cael forced his hands to open, lift from Lux’s boot. Palms up, he watched Lux doubt, and hold, and change his grip on the knife. There were eels coiled through every tunnel of this place, and Cael paid more attention to those stories than most. They didn’t have time for this; he didn’t have time to _be here_ , like this.

“I will pull us both out of here,” he warned, setting his hands back against the wall. Lux backed up a step, crouching to retrieve Cael’s sword and hold it at his side. “Fuck with me when this is over — shoot my fucking head off. Don’t fuck this up for spite.” 

If Lux felt at all chastened, Cael had no sense of it behind his armor. He stepped back into Cael’s space, would be crowding him into the wall, if not for the defiance of Cael’s posture. When he put out the sword for Cael’s hand, he left his own on the hilt, forcing Cael to tangle their fingers. It felt less a catharsis, and more the tension built, aimed, given a new context. The cut at his knee, every bruise on Lux’s jaw — their bodies were speaking to each other, even if they weren’t. Describing a new fit, new possibility. Cael’s stomach lurched with the impulse to turn it back on — the skinny-pretty wraith who always found the world a little funny, a little worth it, whatever it hurt. Who did whatever he wanted, and maybe that was whatever the person looking at him wanted.

The thought that it could hold Lux, could pull him back from that pit of hurt, made Cael sick.

He stood a straight line, defying Lux’s forward lean. Lux took the hand on the hilt and put it on the wall, braced and bracketing. They had all of their armor on, both of their visors closed. Cael in the present, new enough to see the past but too new to be kind with it, held his lizard brain down under a heel, whispered _don’t you dare._

Above them, the chains supporting the nest creaked, every sway and roll of their fight still working along the links. Lunar winds hissed through the tunnel, where they met the soft vacuum of the drop. Lux’s posture relaxed into something sullen; Cael’s spine curved to match. Neither of them was going to apologize, but Cael sheathed the sword, crossed his arms, kept his place in proximity. If Lux didn’t want it, he could take the step back. If he did — 

Cael would give it. He’d trusted, once, that Lux wouldn’t hurt him. He knew this was because he’d hurt Lux first, because Lux didn’t know enough not to use that name. She didn’t matter. She wasn’t there; wasn’t anywhere but the places Cael carried her. 

It wasn’t Lux’s fault, that he carried her everywhere.

“We could use a Titan,” Lux said, turning his head to look over the drop. Not an apology, but a neutral contribution.

“Only if you want to go in there with a bang,” Cael offered drily. The olive branch was the concession: they were both of them offensive fighters, and maybe they could turn that on the enemy going forward. Lux cocked a hip with one hand on his rifle; Cael couldn’t see him smirk, but he could — feel it. The only warmth he’d imagine Lux had for him, if not for that lean. If not for the reward of his attention. One finger extended from Lux’s fist, not entirely to tell Cael to fuck off. A dip, a lift of the hand; Cael looked up at the chains converging over the nest’s roof. “Chandelier of Havoc,” he asked, hissing a breath audibly through the comm. “What are you going to do, queue up the _1812 Overture_ and ride this thing into the Pit?”

The tilt of Lux’s filter shifted, before he raised a hand to fix it. Definitely smirking. Definitely very thrilled with himself. “Not quite; bomb the tether and follow my lead.”

-

“We actually rode it down to _Dies Irae_ ,” Lux says, a few more Hunters pulled up to the table. Expressions shift an array of doubt and delight, coming off the high of a little Guardian on Guardian violence. He hasn’t sparred with Cael since before they’d adopted Idris — before he was their Vanguard, before they’d gotten married. Lux drops his gaze into his glass; Vidal takes it as a sign to order another. Glass more than half-empty, when Lux’s thoughts snag on the thought: would his brother have so believed in the power of a Ghost, had he never seen the way Cael and Lux could tear into each other for the thrill of it?

A full glass is set at his elbow, and he had been telling a story. Getting to a good part.

“It's not quite the same, played on a single Ghost in a hive-bore, but it had its effect. Cael acted pretty irritated with me, but I like to think that's the moment he really fell in love.”

The array of faces: doubt winning out. Lux shrugs, can't sit across from himself and see the Cayde in his shoulders.

They’d only taken the dropping nest so far; their stop was well before the pits, just enough distance to get on top of their projectile and leap from its roof to a middling platform. Weapons drawn, they’d waited for the distant crash to bring green eyes around the corner —

A concussive beam of violet light tore at the wall of the next room. Sound settling, Lux could hear the fight up ahead, its dying pitch covering their approach. They might not get the credit for their ruse; Lux tried to magnify the feed from his helmet, aimed the sight of his rifle into the Dusk Warren when the zoom blurred and distorted the image. Casualty of a kick to the head. Cael wouldn’t see the twist of his frown, but it made him feel better to form the words _fucking dick_ , clear and crisp in his head.

In his scope, a pair of Fallen Captains were shifting around an Ogre, flanking to finish it off. In his memory, Cael was sinking sharp teeth into his shoulder, leaving a mark he still carried. He didn’t think it would tear open quite the same, at a mention of Cael’s name. He didn’t think, period, about what he’d torn open to earn the ache in his jaw.

“We’ve got Reavers up ahead,” he warned. “On top of the usual. Lift probably goes to the Wolf Ketch.”

There wasn’t time to read Cael’s terse nod; he’d fit both hands to a sidearm so small it looked like a toy, moved like a shadow between smooth stone and the first stack of crates. The space, when Lux followed the curve of its wall in the other direction, was littered with broken, standing rocks and gathered supplies. The Fallen were darting between cover, beating back the Hive. The diffuse dark of distant starlight was pushed back by spotlights on the walls, orange flares staked to mark the crates. 

Too much cover, too low to the ground; Lux slung the rifle over his shoulder and loaded his cannon, signaling the battle of two fronts by shooting a Vandal in the back of its head. It crumpled enough for the Dreg beside it to turn, chittering something along the line. An electric hum rippled the air, and only the barest flare of blue light along their edges told him a stealth team was weaving through the space. Clicking his tongue in his mouth, Lux shot the Dreg down as it tried to point out his trajectory. The Hive had their magic, their sickening numbers — Fallen knew how to scrape what they had together and bring a fight.

A little like Guardians. Lux could almost wonder, what would the Fallen have made of themselves with the Traveler’s light — just not enough to hold his fire when they turned on him. Cael was a flash of violet in the white and orange lights, leaving grenades or siphoning bolts of the Void in his wake. His shots were quiet, percussive; he’d drop into a wide gap and bend light around his body, staggering a group of Vandals and sparking them into view. Lux fell into a rhythm with his cannon, resting on each target for the lapse of a single breath, to be sure Cael wasn’t going to appear between the bullet leaving the chamber and landing in heads, chests, aiming hands. The Void cut, chilled the air of the space; Ether steamed from mouths, released in a white cloud as the enemy fell. And they did fall, Lux taking shots as Cael drove them from cover, exposed them to the eye, drained firelight shields while Lux wore them down with concussive shots.

He was spending his light in flashes, a trickle of power to move him across the room, a brief flash and bang before moving to the next target. It let the Solar sit under Lux’s skin and warm him against its chill, dry him against the humid funk of worm-carved tunnels and their fetid winds. Let him shore a small sun at his center, saved for his real enemy.

Taniks appeared as they cut down the last Captain, Lux bringing down the rifle once Cael cleared him enough space to use it. He swung the sights and barrel without hesitation, Cael sidestepping a slumping body in his periphery. One foot set back to brace him on the stone wall; Lux fired twice into Taniks red helm, hoping the impact of Andal’s rifle rattled through Taniks’ memory.

It had certainly gotten his attention. With a scrape of metal arms, Taniks lifted the scorch cannon and charged it, aimed on Lux’s position. His rank and classification uncertain, Taniks stood tall enough to find Lux over his cover, and he lined up the next shot — digging in his foot to brace against the firestorm. If he could keep his stance, he could unload the chamber before his target moved.

A black shape stilled his finger over the trigger; Cael blinked to Taniks’ elbow, was dropping from Lux’s aim to cut the cannon’s shot wide with his blade. It seemed in miniature — not just for the distance, but for the size of the elbow it was cutting into. Stone showered Lux’s position as the blast tore into the wall above, and he slung the rifle over his back to move.

There would be other shots, without Cael in his sights.

A metallic clatter drew Lux’s attention, as he swept the edge of the room for a new vantage. A second pulled it from Taniks to a toppled pile of crates and chipped stone — Cael had relieved Taniks of an arm, wires and Ether leaking into the air, and been subsequently thrown across the Warren. The sun went sullen in Lux’s core, fury muting to frustration, and every impact of his boots sent a shock up his side as he closed with Cael’s position. He was sweating under his armor, clammy with nerves. Taniks had slipped from his sights but a moment, lost along the lift with a guttural challenge. 

Cael had cost him three shots; Cael had put this ache in his jaw, when he ground his teeth.

Cael had also closed with a monster, to keep Lux out of cannon fire. His heart thudded with his steps, until Piko sent word through Epsilon: “ _I think he’s jamming the comms._ ”

Lux eased to a stop against his own momentum, dragging around the mess of crates. Cael was rolling one shoulder, pulling his own arm, but upright. “He certainly knows we’re here.” Lifting both arms, he made a curve of his body, reminiscent of a dancer’s stretch. Lux rolled back his own shoulders under the weight of the rifle, finding a flat plane of rock on which to rest his gaze.

_Eyes up, Guardian._

“You think that teleporting has something to do with the ship,” he asked, lifting his gaze further to the lift. His own discomfort allowed an interlude, Epsilon sending warmth to soothe the tight muscles down one side, echoed along his bad leg. Their Ghosts, if nothing else, needed the moment to gather back their light.

“Maybe,” Cael said, a tone Lux decided meant _no_. “He’s big enough, I’m not surprised he can move like an Archon.” In either case, the ship wasn’t an advantage they could take from him.

Lux didn’t imagine he’d be gunning so hotly for Cael that he would come back out, even if they ran through the tunnels, carrying his severed arm. “Think you can keep up with it,” he asked, allowing himself a glance at the sword. Cael wasn’t the first Warlock he’d met, kitted out for close fights. He’d just met most of them in a Crucible ring. “He’s gonna know better than to let you in close.”

Cael lifted his chin, inviting with the line of his throat. Like he could tell, visor or no, when Lux was looking at him.

“Watch me.”

-

Lux carried the clammy awareness of his own body onto the ship, feeling the fold and press of his clothes against every crease of skin, sticking together or peeling apart as he moved. The loading dock was electrical hum and gunfire, a clash of blades punctuating guttural cries, chittering screeches. Taniks hadn’t retreated far: when their feet dropped to the floor, guns drawn and posture low, he’d stood at the nearest door. Dregs had rippled his cloak with their passing, swarming into the room before Taniks teleported to its other side.

There was a real heft of presence, when he moved; Lux was singularly aware of his silhouette, with every shot rocked from his hip. He was not going to lose his target, dancing around cover and taking careful aim. Dregs met his bullets and fell back into their fellows, were shoved aside in the struggle to get to the Guardians, force their Ghosts into sight.

Cael, true to his word, dogged Taniks between loading docks and fluctuating scales. Lux, true to his, watched like they were the only things worthy of his gaze.

He could let it go now, that sullen sun. Solar light would spin the Dregs out on the weightlessness of their own disintegration — but he would have only one shot left for his target, and no guarantee of keeping Cael out of the blast. The best he could do was look out for himself, moment to moment. Live for the opportunity and hope Cael would do the same, trying to chase a Guardian killer with his sword. Lux had thought Taniks particularly bloodthirsty, a heavy-hitter who relished the fight. But he was shrewd enough not to chase them, making a second retreat as his Vandals swept the room as cover.

Lux took up a spear still held in two of four alien hands, wrenching it in close for a gut shot. He shook the Vandal free of the handle and stepped over its body, newly armed to close with the next wave. That awareness tightened along his nerves, aimed him at the door. He was shaking from adrenaline, not quite flagging, when he beat the last Vandal aside and stood at the door, his weight on the pad prompting it to open.

Drifting back down from a high leap, the last Captain drained by his grenades, Cael seemed less to sag than finally inhabit his own body. His sidearm was pulled, his steps landed with real weight. When Lux moved toward the door, bodies and better sense strewn behind, Cael didn’t blink into the frame — with those same measured steps, he put a heel down on the bottom of Lux’s cloak. The door closed on him, and when Lux angled his head to vent frustration, there was no raised hilt; Cael’s helmet was open along its carbon hinge. His white eyes glowed, burning the edge of dark lashes. He had stepped out of time, nothing on that face to indicate he hadn’t left the apartment for a battle with the Hive, and Lux had lived six years catching up.

Lux turned, as much movement he could force under that stare. He was the animal in the floodlight of Cael’s eyes, unable even to search for safety on the sides of the room. Seeing Cael’s face was worse, somehow, than hearing his voice on the comm.

He dropped the filter from his mask, pulled it down under his chin. In anticipation of what, he wouldn’t be pressed to say — but it was better to breathe the air of the closed room. When Cael rose up in his boots and reached up with one hand, Lux tilted his head forward to meet it, unthinking. Fingers, even gloved, on his chin. Fingers tracing his jaw, reorienting him in the space and his own body. He stretched and sighed and lowered himself for it, only for Cael to pluck away the card tucked into his collar, careful not to touch him at all.

It was such an echo of their first meeting, it salted the wound of disappointment. Softly, as softly as he’d hoped to lean in, Lux recoiled.

“Should I change my callsign,” Cael asked, flipping the Queen of Spades back out from his scrutiny.

“You don’t get to do that,” Lux growled, liquid heat rising in his chest. “Not now.”

“Yet here I am, having done it.” When Lux made to grab the card, Cael moved his hand back on the first try, tucking it into his palm. It forced Lux to take his wrist instead, hold it close to his chest. Lux knew it was retaliation, as much as a stalling tactic. Another distraction, making him stand in one place until his breathing evened, his hands stopped shaking.

“All you’ve done since you got here is get in the way and try to unbalance me,” he accused, tightening his grip when Cael tried to back up for the ground on which to argue.

“You think — “ he stopped, sucking in a breath. A section of his hair, tucked down against his throat, spilled out on a curve along his cheek, enough for Lux to realize how much it had grown. Everything else — the scar on his jaw, the indents from his own teeth on is lips — Lux stopped shaking, but only by tightening his hand around Cael’s gauntlet. If he was unbalanced, it was because Cael was the only thing that could swing his attention from this mission. If he was in the way, it was because he was the only thing for which Lux would pause. “You’re already off balance,” Cael decided, softening in Lux’s grip until it slipped, until he was holding Cael’s hand around the card. “You shouldn’t even be here, neither of us should be here — and all I can think about is getting you through this suicide mission alive.”

If he told Cael to fuck off, if he set the room afire with Solar light, slammed a door, wrote him a note to discard him — he looked at the set of Cael’s jaw, the waver of his searching look. His lashes cast shadow over his cheeks, from the light of his eyes.

Would Cael have pushed the door down and stayed?

Had he left because Cael was afraid of him, or had he been afraid of Cael?

Epsilon finally appeared at his shoulder, chanced the empty room to assess damage, plan their strategy around exhausting bodies and worn armor. He rolled into the space between them, scanning and closing a scar on Cael’s cheek, now oily as a new wound. The cuts on his lips were similarly raw. That must have been the Void — warping time, opening old wounds.

Must have been.

Feeling the wound close, Cael dropped the card to send Lux after it, breaking the tether of their hands and closing his helmet. Epsilon shimmered, returned to the space below Lux’s ribs, where he nurtured that small sun of burning hurts. Whatever the past had opened in Lux, Epsilon could not close, and Lux’s armor was failing to hide.

All he could do was carry it on, and hope what he bled onto the ship met its match in Fallen loss.

-

Taniks hadn’t lingered in the halls, but his retreat was hardly obscured by their branching number. His voice crunched through communications panels, his front line became a trail of bodies in their wake. Cael took up his own rifle at Lux’s elbow, helping to clear intersections, send Dregs retreating down their next turn. Eventually it opened into the hull proper, judging from the height of its ceiling, the catwalks and pipes crossed in a web between decks. There were walkways and platforms raised slightly from the floor, wide cargo canisters meant for servitors or drops of ground troops. Taniks didn’t linger in the room, visible only for the time it took to call in his heavy troops.

Cael managed to note the snipers at the back of the room, before the Walker dropped.

A pair of Guardians, even a pair with a little bad blood, could handle a Walker. The enclosed space wasn’t ideal, and it could take time, but with a little focus and mobility, it wouldn’t have posed a real threat.

With Taniks retreating behind it, pulling on Lux’s focus, and the number of enemies rushing to defend — a physical weight lurched through Cael’s gut, dropped from somewhere behind his sternum. They were wearing down — if not physically, then as two personalities and histories scraping together. Lux kept his rifle at the ready, picking off mined Shanks at a distance and rocking the bay with their blasts. Sniping the snipers on the catwalks, out of bullets by the time he got a clear shot at the Walker’s legs. By the time he righted the rifle against his shoulder, a fresh wave seemed upon them, the trail of bodies leading them to this: the central point to which Taniks could usher all of his support.

Cael couldn’t decide if this was it, if they would be hammered down by heavy artillery until they could not get up, or if Taniks expected them to come out of this room alive. Alive and bloodied, Ghosts realized to tend their wounds.

He would’ve ended this a lot faster if he’d just locked a few doors.

Another pack of Vandals kicked aside the bodies lining the pipe, while its corrugated sides rattled with each shot from the Walker. Cael stood back from the entrance, readying sword and sidearm at his sides, squaring his stance for the assault. Exploding mines preceded the groan and clatter of the Walker taking a knee, but he could only offer a round of shots toward its core, before the Vandals fired and advanced. He took the hit, shots burning through his armor, the pain pulling at Solar light long smothered at his core. He could call on it, if he could trick that core into responding. Trick his body into needing it.

Nobody had to teach him; nobody had thought to teach him, when strength justified his existence. He’d learned this trick the way everyone did — locked on a closed map with other Guardians, all of them out for blood and rank. 

Locked in his existence, so many holes cut between his old reality and new, that his Ghost couldn’t reach him if that core didn’t burn a little brighter. Lux would bring his fury; Cael would show Taniks that a Warlock was a harder kind of Guardian to kill. The shout preceding a shot to the Vandal’s head warmed him further: he had Lux’s attention now, and Taniks wasn’t here to challenge him for it.

As if one light called the other, now that he’d tapped it, he could sense Lux bright and sullen across the room. His own light had been withheld, used only to heal his cheek. He was saving it — needed to save it. Cael fed his light on every death, from blade or bullet or his own cold hands — but it was taking its toll, physically. The new skin across his chest prickled with Solar, but he knew, if he tried a full offensive blast with the Void, every wound could reopen. He knew, spark or no, Piko might not be able to bring him back.

He didn’t want to be the reason Lux let Epsilon into view; he didn’t want to be the reason the world lost him.

A Vandal fell down the back wall, kicked out of place by its replacement. The Walker shook off its broken plating and stood, its core drawn back into the protective shell. This room was a trap, a long offensive against whatever the Wolves could spare, and still get their Ketch out of this hole. A second store of light, a third Guardian — they wouldn’t fight their way in. They might not even hold out for Variks’ team to arrive. And if they spent everything to walk through that door, they wouldn’t have enough to finish the mercenary. Taniks could be signalling allies beyond it, loading Hive texts, readying the Ketch for orbit.

_Can you keep up with him?_

Cael was going to fucking try.

Shanks, laden with pulsing munition, bumbled out behind the Vandal ranks like pollinating bees. This time, Cael dug a heel and ran; feeling the pull of Lux’s light back to his position, as his eyes and Ghost watched the snipers, watched the laser eye of the Walker sweeping behind. He paused, drew bullet and missile both before making the leap to Lux’s vantage in the corner.

The propulsion of his boots was slow, and the Fallen had other snipers. The next bullet shattered his ankle before he completed the arc; he landed choking and askew — Lux and the rifle a single entity with a single posture, gathered in Cael’s open arms. Solar faught Void in response to the pain; he had to push it down, had to focus on how much it hurt. She’d taught him that. She’d taught him that when he was fourteen years old — to smother the flames and make his suffering a needle — and he was going to use it now. He was going to put his weight down on the wrong foot and hold in the scream, until he gathered one fold of reality against the next, and pulled them both through it.

Taniks was waiting on the other side.

Cael couldn’t know, if he’d just stood behind the door. If he’d gone on to make his orders and returned. Were Piko a working Ghost, capable of anything his body needed in the moment, she would have been destroyed. If Lux hadn’t been sick from the jump, reeling against the door and retching hollowly into his own hands, he might have destroyed her with his own weapon of light. Cael pushed instinctively away as they left the gap, finding what footing he could manage to impose himself between them.

When he put his blade down in Tanik’s foot, it was a retaliation made from trying to catch himself. His own was dead beneath his ankle and on fire above it, his boot lined and slowly coated with oily blood. He found terror on the outside of the jump, too late to leave it in the Void. Not for the looming threat, chittering and roaring down at him.

If this didn’t end, for better or worse, in this hallway — what would Lux do?

Piko couldn’t fix his ankle, after the jump. Cael couldn’t walk. Taniks would win his attention back in another retreat, and Lux might go on without him, and then — and then.

Would a missing arm, a wounded foot, be enough? Would Cael have done anything today, but deliver Taniks the next notch in his cannon?

“Did you really think he might leave you,” Selena asks, breaking softly through the silence Cael had stretched. It is a difficult but necessary thing, to think about what it looks like when Lux is leaving him behind. A mental exercise for how bad it could get, then and now. A trick of the mind similar to the tricks he’d played on his body, to wring a little more energy toward what needed to be done.

He looks down at Idris, docile in his arms. Sure of the story’s triumphant end, with his parents alive and together.

“It didn’t matter,” he assures her, moving the story forward. “Minutes later I had proof that he wouldn’t.” 

-

_Fucking dick_ , Lux thought again, as if he could broadcast it between them. The Void was oil and cold, anathema to the warmth beneath his skin. It sent the light rolling in his core, made him vacate his stomach down the door he was propped against. The door he’d been focused on, between shots, now seen from its other side. 

Lux propped himself up, shaking off the vertigo and leaning on his rifle. Cael held his attention a moment longer — ire wrung lower, strewn across the bottom of his gut in a form Lux couldn’t name. His sharp silhouette was trying, failing to stand tall against Taniks — and when he went down on one knee, he made it count. The space Taniks commanded, now as close as Lux had ever seen him, rocked and rattled with his scream, but there were three egos in this fight to dominate, survive; Taniks squared his stance, pivoted to his pinned foot. Cael’s black helmet perfectly reflected the whitening ring of the scorch cannon, aimed too close to miss.

Piko had to be too smart or too weak to be in sight, the way Cael’s foot hung in his boot. Lux didn’t want to find out the hard way. He cast the sniper rifle to one side, letting it nest the muzzle in a panel and land slant. He flung the cling of his cloak back behind him, the flourish drawing Taniks' gaze, even if it didn’t draw the gun.

“I could use the palette cleanser,” he said to the inside of his helmet. Lux drew his gun from the air, aiming with the red star of his heart, he channeled the force of its collapse.

Too close to miss: he fired three exploding suns into Taniks' chest.

With enough heat to overload the cannon, Taniks' shot fired early, while he was recoiling from the blast. Each Solar flare expanded in its space, tearing away armor, singing the houseless banner along its edge. Another arm burned away to the elbow, its materials made for the vacuous cold of space, not the heat of a star. 

Cael rolled away from the simultaneous fire, tugging his sword free and rolling over the flat of it to spare himself the smoldering crater in the floor. Taniks vanished to the next bend, but the fire eating at his carapace was still flaking chitin to ash, and he teleported again without firing another shot. The hook of vengeance pulled in Lux’s chest; he picked up his rifle and made several steps to follow — but Cael lurched sideways trying to push himself up with his sword, kept lurching when it clattered free and wasn’t there to hold him up. Instinctively, Lux put out the arm to catch him, reel him in close, but his gaze stayed on the halls, the trail of ash winding down to the floor.

Too weak, he realized, when Piko didn’t appear. What was Cael _doing,_ what was Ikora allowing, sending him on this mission? _To die would be the next great thesis project_ , said every goddamn Warlock ever. The adrenaline of the hunt met the adrenaline of fear, Epsilon rolling it out through all of his points when Lux released him to assess the damage. “How bad is it,” he asked, tightening his grip on Cael’s waist. Against his side, Cael’s breath was a tight, short thing, like an animal refusing to voice its pain.

“ _The Void fights my healing,_ ” Epsilon said, “ _It will take time._ ”

Cael, panting in his grip, found one hold on his cloak and another on his bandolier, hanging his weight when Lux moved to set him down. Unbalancing him again, tearing him back from the fight. Why did Cael get him this far if he just meant to hold him back, why was he there at all, if he couldn’t let Lux finish this? But he could shake Cael off, in the moment. He could press a foot to his ankle until his grip broke, or break it with his own hands. He could go on, alone, if it was what he really wanted, his Ghost well away from Taniks, racing a clock.

Cael’s grip was already shaking its weakness against his back. He was really hurt, really spent, to get them this far. He might not be able to defend himself, left in the hall. He might kill himself, trying to jump them both out. Lux’s own grip shook in turn, wound up, terrified that he wouldn’t be able to kill Taniks, to avenge Andal. Terrified that he’d have to kill Taniks, alone, to save Cael. That one or both of them would die here and he wouldn’t — 

He wouldn’t ever know, if the killing could make the hole go away. If that month meant anything to Cael, years ago. Why he had to leave.

If he died here, he’d never get to mean anything to anyone. If Cael died here, he’d never get to mean anything to Cael.

“Lux, don’t.” Cael’s helmet was open again, but he wasn’t beseeching. His gaze was narrowed, fierce, teeth bared like a threat. Like he’d find a way to get up on his shattered ankle and beat Lux to the ground just to keep him there, if he had to.

Lux was spent of Solar, lost in the fading heat of his own power, lost in the lurch of — yearning. He could name it, feeling it tug him in two directions. Feel it becoming all of him, more inherent than the fire he’d been given. Things lost, things just out of reach. The old wound in his hip ached, with the hollows of his face, the joints of his hands. A network of grief on tethers of rejection, lighting up as Taniks moved further and further away from the fact of Cael in his arms. 

“It’s Andal,” was all he could express in the moment, all he could admit of the fear. “I have to, it’s _Andal._ ”

“No, Lux,” Cael grit, climbing his grip to Lux’s shoulder, dragging them closer. “No, it’s you. For me, _it’s you._ ”

It was too much, said too fiercely, too close. Meant to cut into him and hold him in one place. Cael was so — bad at this. He was _bad at this_ , and Lux was falling for it like a desert given rain, for the fact of those eyes on him, for the fact of _mattering_ , regardless of how badly it salted the wound. “Then why did you make me _leave?_ ”

Cael retreated into the scoop of his own shoulders. His expression fell around his sidelong gaze, not quite dismissive but still asking: _you want to do this now?_ Lux didn’t want to do this period, but Cael had been winding him since the start, dragging his depths with every look, every angle of his posture that didn’t serve the mission. Of course it would be now, Cael unable to walk, unable to even let Epsilon heal him. There would be no better place to make him say it, cornered in the heart of a Fallen ship, in the depths of Hive tunnels, both of them bleeding from wounds that wouldn’t close and a Guardian Killer around the next corner. Lux hung on his answer harder than Cael hung on his shoulder.

“I thought, I — “

The hesitation leaned Lux in, knowing it must be for some choice. He suspected it was between two or more lies. “Don’t bullshit me, Cael. Don’t.”

Cael’s gaze stayed on the nearest panel, or the air in front of it. Slanted to one side, but steady, not searching for the answer. Just afraid to look at Lux when he gave it. What was it, that Cael could stand between Lux and harm on a broken ankle, but couldn’t look him in the eye right now? What was it, that Lux could understand that dichotomy completely? “Sometimes,” he said, rolling in the cuts on his lower lip, licking them clean again. “When you survive without something for so long, too much of it makes you sick. Like food, or water.”

He could look at Lux now, refusing to say it.

Love.

The bullet of Cael’s presence, the collapsing sun of his need, the thing that sucked Lux away from his sharpened purpose. Lux loved him, six long years ago. Six short years, for how much it stung, how much it still held him in place. “You,” he accused, closing his arms and fitting Cael entirely to his side, tucking him under the grip on his shoulder. “You’re the most selfish person I’ve ever met.”

Cael kept looking at him, letting what he hadn’t said ring true. The space warmed between them; Lux was catching, storing some burgeoning Solar. As the sounds of the ship faded from his attention, there was a buzzing up close, the faintest hum of a familiar song. His mother still played it, like something she’d always known, in Lux’s better dreams.

He noticed too late how Cael had unsheathed the knife on his bandolier, squeezed its blade until it cut into fingers and palm. His blood was the oil on which the fire caught — was that what it took, to call on it? Was that what Void did to a Guardian? Cael didn’t flinch, and Lux didn’t either, feeling the molten siphon — not the nurturing warmth of the Sunsingers at the tower, but the inversion of that cold, cutting power Cael had used to move them. The cold he’d used to push Lux out of the apartment. Nothing could be easy, with him. All of the soft moments, all of the holding arms and warm laughter — a slip of groundwater over the bedrock of Cael’s intensity. This was him, bloodied in Lux’s arms, saying, “You’re right.”

He squared some internal stance, while Epsilon dragged together the shattered bones of his ankle, and he had no real feet on which to stand. He still looked ready to sweep Lux at the leg and rekindle the fight. “The only thing I care about more than myself is what’s mine.”

Lux was infuriated, transfixed. Cael’s intent burned as sullenly as his light, and Lux wouldn’t forgive himself, but wouldn’t deny — he was out of sorts, angry, but already wondering what it was going to be like, when he gave in. When Cael fucked him again. Would it be like the fight, like the drop? Or would it be like this, ugly and possessive as it healed?

Epsilon disappeared when he finished, wary of Taniks' return. Lux held a moment longer, one arm around Cael, splitting him over his thigh while the other reached over and took up, shouldered his rifle. There wasn’t time, for all the time that Cael had made out of desperation. When Cael forced his hands open, Lux did the same, reluctantly separating to their corners. Cael sheathed his sword, taking down his own rifle to cover Lux’s advance. Lux took up the cannon and spear at his waist.

“Good hunting,” Cael wished him, the burn of his gaze still visible, the pretense of his armor abandoned with white fire still licking his hand. He wouldn’t need Piko, in the final fight. That was what he’d carried them this far on.

For a moment, Lux wished he’d loosened his own helmet. That it wouldn’t be a waste of time, wouldn’t still be a mistake, to kiss him. “You’ll have my back,” he said, not a question.

Cael didn’t nod, didn’t blink.

“Always.”

-

He hadn’t meant to say it, even so obliquely — but Cael could do nothing to take it back. Could do nothing to obscure intent, following Lux into the ugliest part of the fight: Taniks cornered in his lower holds, his forces redirecting from the hull. There wasn’t room to move the Walker toward them — and it would be over, for one side or another, before the shanks could carry their loads through the halls. Cael shot out the panel beside the last door, locking them out, and felt the blast of timed explosives beyond it. 

Light, in all of its forms, reshaped reality. Rerolled the odds. The heavy arms Taniks had rallied against them would fail him in the tighter spaces of his ship, and he was struggling to aim the cannon anywhere but the floor. Every blast from it rocked the weapon into his chest, driving him back with a screech of pain. Cael backed into the room with Lux, feeling the slap of his cloak when he moved to give chase. He picked off Dregs and shimmering Vandals as they flanked from smaller entrances, shooting out panels as he found them to close Taniks in. He would die this day, alone, in a grave of his own making. 

_He will die_ , Cael knew, when Taniks teleported into Lux’s space and beat him down bodily with the cannon.

His helmet dissolved entirely from his frame, returned to Piko’s storage. Cael shouted an eloquent _Hey asshole_ — and unloaded the rifle’s clip at his head. Eventually his chin lifted on the pelting momentum, and Cael hurled the rifle itself at the alien column of his neck. Whether it hurt or merely irritated, Taniks flashed out of the space, appeared on the cover of a central platform. Cael ran for Lux, pulling his sword hard from the sheath across his back. It dug into the meat of his shoulder, drawing up Solar with his blood. “I’ve got it,” he told Epsilon, snatching every finger around his materializing points to pull him out of view. 

“Come on,” he told Lux, pulling one arm across his shoulders, standing up under Lux’s weight. It was too much, crouching Cael too low to move him, but as he hummed the Solar light rose within him, licking against Lux’s injuries, filling his empty stores. Epsilon fed in the light he’d brought to heal him, encouraged Lux in his own heavy-handed, berating tone. 

“ _Finish this,_ ” Epsilon growled, static all through his voice. Before Cael could free the hand to stop him, he’d flown up between them and Taniks’ charging cannon, aimed down on them from his vantage. The edge of Lux’s armor dug into Cael’s cheek, when he closed his eyes, sunk into the terror and begged the smothered flame not to fail him. 

He felt the moment it left, given to the air and another Guardian. 

“ _Finish this,_ ” Piko echoed, feeding the last of Cael’s light into Lux.

Lux’s arm slipped from his shoulders, finding a hold on Cael’s side. He took his own weight, dragging Cael up as he stood and aimed his gun a second time. Their Ghosts shimmered out of sight, the scorch cannon blast meeting Lux’s first shot in a terrible blossom of heat and sound. Cael was blinded, almost deaf, only the flash of more light to tell him Lux had stood his ground and fired the second time.

When the shapes of the room resolved, Taniks’ carapace was disintegrating around the final shot, white light lifting his head and shoulders from the rest of his body. As the light faded, it fell onto the platform, and his other half toppled to the floor.

Lux sagged; Cael sagged harder, and Lux found his footing for Cael’s sake. 

This — this was the part Cael could not let him do alone.

“Good job,” he whispered, gentled by exhaustion and — the need of it. His hand found a hold, under Lux’s cloak, on the back of his bandolier. Cael knew he oughtn’t touch, because of what touch had been between them. But it was all he wanted, and all he had to give. 

When Lux kicked off the floor, engaged his armor to make the platform, Cael forced himself to do the same. His ankle was tender, but responding, and the lingering ache was the proof that he was whole.

The half of Taniks strewn across the platform was like a shipwreck, a sundered monument. The hull of what passed for ribs was open to their view, Ether leaking from the cavity in time with the severed lines, the tank missing with most of his back. His banner furled out like an empty sail, torn but intact. The universe would acknowledge, with its hideous geometry, the survival of that symbol. It meant something, in that equation, for the body to die that the legacy might live.

Lux bent and cut it from Taniks’ shoulders. The tunnels of Luna sang around the ship, of legacies ended, subsumed. The universe would acknowledge, but the Hive would not remember, and Guardians would not celebrate the loser of this fight. Cael let the prescient song pull on him, and Lux took some of his weight.

It wasn’t what hung his shoulders, folding Taniks’ colors in his fists.

“I thought this would fix everything,” he admitted, bringing both hands close to his chest. “Instead it’s just — empty. He’s still gone. He’s always going to be gone.”

Cael knew he oughtn’t touch — but he already was. Words wouldn’t change what he’d done any more than revenge had filled the hole of Andal. Cael wound his clinging arm around to Lux’s other side, pulling as he moved in, head to Lux’s chest. Lux resisted so briefly, Cael had yet to loose the grip before Lux crushed him in. His other hand swiped up against the back of Cael’s head, loosing part of his hair. There was a clip of sound, the suction of pressure from skin, and the filter of Lux’s helmet dragged against his crown, was replaced with shaking breath. Cael wanted to be sorry — wanted to be responsible enough for it to be sorry. 

He’d done what he thought he could, six years ago. He did what he thought he could now.

Piko appeared in Lux’s dropped hand, and when he raised it, she had left the old rabbit’s foot behind.

Lux choked, his hand raising to the back of Cael’s neck to find and squeeze a hold. “You still had this?”

“I never meant to take it. I only kept it because — “ Lux’s finger was pressed along the tendon behind his ear, warm through his gauntlet. His chest heaved a breath under Cael’s cheek, and he felt that breath bearing down, then the chill of Lux desperately drawing it back in. He’d kept it, thinking — hoping Lux would come back. Even if it was just to demand its return, the Cael of that year, that hideously needy version of himself, would have made something of it.

He wasn’t going to make anything of it now, Lux as broken open as Taniks’ body. “I met him once,” he said, letting Lux chase a different dream. Letting himself be careful, with Lux’s worn edges. “It was after I met you.” Lux’s fingers tightened in confusion. “You see a lot of strange things, in the Void. Where it touches.” Andal had touched it more than most Hunters, who still made lives for themselves in the city. Touched it enough to die on the end of a cannon, his Ghost’s mind dragged inside-out but its shell intact, to find another bearer.

That could be Piko, one day.

Cael breathed deep, let Lux do the same. “He told me — he told me to look out for you. I didn’t do a very good job of that, but I brought it today, so he could be here. So he could help me have your back.”

Careful as he wanted to be, Cael was ready when Lux crumpled into him. His ankle was sore but holding, his light a slow trickle, this far from its source. He sank slowly, taking Lux’s weight and guiding it down. Lux didn’t offer the pack of cigarettes, and Cael didn’t have a story they hadn’t just lived — but he bracketed Lux in his arms, clawed his gauntlets in his hair when he sobbed, and held on. Every whining inhale was harder to hear than the moonsong, and every exhale made Lux curl his hand in Cael’s hair and gently shake him, so he wouldn’t have to shake.

It wasn’t enough, felt like it could never be enough, until it was.

“Do you want to be the big boy who blasts us out with the scorch cannon,” Cael asked, saccharine and indulgent, in the space of Lux’s calming breaths.

Lux hiccuped, and laughed. “Fuck _you._ ”

  


* * *

III.

Cael stretches when Selena takes Idris from him, arching his spine over the hard edge of his chair until it pops. “Why does talking about our wild youth always make me feel old,” he asks, yawning into both hands. It’s almost time, according to the clock over the doorway. He watches the seconds pass from between his fingers, until Idris’ shift and soft mewl urge him to pass over the missing curve of his toy. 

He won’t sleep through the night — he rarely can — but Selena will be here. With her own stories, with her better tended heart. “You’ve made it sound much more fun than I remember it,” she says, flipping up the edge of her skirt around Idris, holding him close.

“Well, you spent most of it down here, worrying about me.” The version he’d given Selena, returning from Luna, hadn’t been a fairy tale — but it had been similarly pared down. Less friendly-fire, a lot of asserting that he was fine, and he didn’t want to talk about Lux. Before tonight’s dramatics, he isn’t sure he’d ever told her about his shattered ankle. At the time it would have reminded her of his fragility, the hurt it took for him to heal. To Idris, it’s just a story. A time one of his dads saved the other, risked vengeance for — love, or loyalty to the living.

Cael needs to remember it that way, these days.

Given time, Lux will choose them. One day at a time, until it stops being a choice. Cael finds a smile for Selena, lifting his head out of his hands, rubbing the sensitive skin under his eyes. “Parts of it were fun, if you were there.”

“I am sure you and Lux had a very good time with parts of that trip,” she replies primly, draping her skirt higher over Idris, protecting him from the implication. Cael sharpens his smile on it, for all they’d done nothing of the sort. “Cael,” she asks softly, petting the hair still visible above the hem. “Who _do_ you tell the real stories?”

It should be her, after everything. It should have been her _before_ everything. Before Taniks, before the dragon. But she speaks softly, and her nails are so clean, where they card back Idris’ hair. But she holds his son when he can’t, when he doesn’t have enough hands left for everything to which he lays claim. Idris, Selena, Lux. Luka and her daughter, left in Castor’s world without him. He isn’t Lux, drunk and babbling after his first night out with his new responsibilities. He isn’t Vanguard, or a new generation of nobility, trying to cover a whole city with their reach. 

He just knows a few people who are, and he tries to keep them going.

Castor might have known the most; Cael wonders if it did anything to sway him in the moment. If he even needed swaying, to throw himself in front of Lux’s Ghost. That’s what Castor was, that’s what Castor did. Cael could rely on him, when it came to Lux — and it makes the story of Taniks true, no matter how it’s told. 

At its core is that impulse — to take care of him. At its core is that desperation — that he is out here alone, and he might not be enough.

“Nobody,” he sighs, still smiling when Selena stills her hand over Idris’ head. When she knows better than to reach for him, and let him stagnate in his own grief. “I got used to living them with someone else.”

-

Four pints, nine months — Lux knows Cael will do some terrible arithmetic at a later date, to find out what it took for Lux to lift a hand and look this happy to see him in the jangling of the bar’s door His shout is more infectious than slurred, when he calls his husband’s name — and anyone given pause by a Warlock’s long coat, or the Cult’s deep blue, has heard enough of Lux’s tale to lift their glass and roar a warm welcome with the rest.

Even Vidal, two strikes into the late innings, adjusts his posture. Lux claps him on the shoulder when he drops his hand, shaking him like a puppy.

Four rounds sit much looser and rosier on his companions, than they could on Lux’s frame. It’s no excuse for the warmth in his chest, new and old, liquid-hot. Cael will do the math, and Lux won’t think too much of it all — tonight he’s a clouded thing, not quite ready to shed its old skin.

In the doorway, Cael picks at his collar, posture squared to close him against the bar’s scrutiny. It took years to realize: Cael only likes to be the center of Lux’s attention, and he’ll endure an audience to claim it. He lifts his head when Lux wolf-whistles, marches himself through hands that want his shoulders, his elbows, to pat regard against his back. It’s enough to make him swipe the last of Lux’s drink, when he settles at his elbow, and there’s more than muscle-memory when Lux slings an arm around his waist.

Happiness, long denied, hits harder than the bloom used to.

“Tyndarid was just recounting the Taniks hunt,” Carys explains; Cael’s hand lifts to cancel the drink she orders him, almost in tandem with the fingers slanting to make it. 

“Was he.”

He puts his hand down in Lux’s hair, drawing nails along his scalp. Happiness mellows, melting through him better than a warm drink after a long hunt. Cael’s voice is an undercurrent of sound, reserved for their table — for Lux — in that tone he still can’t place. The one that always implies Cael is bigger on the inside, used to make Lux want to dig in and find out. Used to, until it took every breath, every calorie, every scrap of light, just to make it from their apartment to the Tower. 

There’s something left to spare, looking up at Cael haloed in a hanging light. Maybe it’ll be one more kick in the jaw, to tie _it’s you_ to the more recent: _I still need you._ Maybe Cael will just keep petting his hair; he hasn’t much lived up to the request, but the facts of Cael’s hip under his hand, Cael’s hand on his neck, tell him there’s still time. Lux hums, picking up the pint at his other elbow and draining it, a bit of relish for Vidal’s abortive protest. He licks his lips and sighs, looking at each of his Hunters in turn, advice dragged from the bottom of a glass: “You’re not a Guardian until you're famous for one of the worst days of your life.”

“Taniks,” Cael asks, undercutting the tension of the syllables and Lux’s own dramatics with the hand carding back his hair. “Taniks was a walk in the park.” Pinning Lux’s audience with his floodlight gaze, Lux feels the flick at his hood before it comes up over his face. “Come on you, stop lying to these good people; we’ve places to be.”

Not for the first time, if first in a long while, Lux wonders: who made Cael so good at this version of himself? Who made the performance so real, that nothing seemed to change it for watching eyes? Lux can name each and every man behind the expansiveness of his words, the way he lays his drinks on a little thick when he sweeps an arm out and asks: “Don’t you want to stay where everybody knows your name?”

Whatever response Cael’s lips part around, he closes them on. “Help me get him up,” he tells the Hunters behind them, watching Lux hang his weight to make them work for it. Vidal pushes up out of his seat, against Lux’s shoulder, like he’ll be the deciding factor, and Lux wonders if it would be too much — leaning in to put Vidal back in his seat.

A cold draft flicks the hem of Cael’s coat, brushes the edges of the table with frost. The light carbon of Cael’s left arm hooks under Lux’s right, up and around his shoulder — and no matter how Lux shifts his weight, Cael hauls him away from the table without a single buckled step.

-

“Did I embarrass you,” Lux asks, still playing a bit drunk. He’s done a good enough job of it for Cael to pin him in an alley, two fingers to the bottom of his ribs, and have Piko shine a light in his eyes. If those Hunters had put enough beer on their tabs, to really loosen up a Tyndarid — Cael doubts they’d still be on friendly terms. 

In the question, Cael wonders — is he trying to avoid a fight?

“Why would I suddenly care about that? Why would you?” He flattens his hand on Lux’s chest. Not drunk, not high. Cael won’t admit it a second time, that he doesn’t quite know what to do with him. 

He could have waited, until after tonight.

Lux leans down, kissing the tense point between his brows. No: he couldn’t have.

“That ramen stand is packed,” he reports, shifting to his toes, following when Lux lifts his head. He gets the second kiss, leaning into Lux, leaned against the wall. He gets an arm around his back, holding him in place, and tucks his chin against the edge of Lux’s breastplate. “There’s a roof we can watch from, but I’ll have to pull us there.”

“I will throw up on your shoes,” Lux promises.

“You’ll throw up over the side of the building,” Cael says, aiming Lux over it when he leans through the Void. “Here,” he adds, catching the canteen Piko drops into his hand, pressing it into Lux’s grip. More than bile goes over the side of the building; Lux ate his lunch today.

“You’re usually only mean to me when there’s an audience,” Lux accuses, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “It was just — “

Whatever argument he thinks they’re having, he aborts, breathing deep from the cool night and drinking deeper from the canteen. Cael smooths a hand over his side, trying — not to indulge him, but to tell him: “I’m not punishing you, Lux, I’m getting us up here without breaking and entering.”

“But we could have; broken and entered.” 

“Much as I would love to force you to have that conversation with Hideo.” Cael dismisses the statement prematurely, with a flick of his eyes. Tucking his hands into his sleeves, he sits on the curve of an exposed vent. Heat conducts along his legs, and it groans — but holds — when Lux puts down his own weight. Night air, cool water — the absence of an audience. It isn’t a specific moment, where Lux turns off — but he puts a hand on Cael’s knee, is quiet, watches the line congeal into a mass of people around the ramen shop. The divider is open tonight, light from the kitchen spilling out over the crowd. A prettier picture with some snow, Cael thinks, watching a line cook lift and turn noodles without breaking conversation. They’re here for that, more than the food.

“Hunters always want a story.”

A bit like children, in that regard.

Beside him, Lux is the weight of his hands, the bar of his thigh dwarfing Cael’s own. Seated, his knee sits at the back of Lux’s, but he feels dwarfed less by his size than his silence. Turnabout is fair play, apparently; Cael lets him sit with it, asking Piko without words for the thermos. While he separates it into pieces, Lux fits his hand in the pocket of Cael’s coat, leaves it there.

“They had the sense not to ask about — “ Lux gulps slightly at the night air, deflated. “Uldren.”

A short silence, a murmur: _it doesn’t feel like it’s been a year,_ and a longer silence follows.

At least he’s said that much; Cael lets it sit, afraid to shut Lux down chasing more on the subject. Lux offers nothing else as Cael pours the coffee. Steam rises in the night air, illuminated by neon, the city lights reflecting off the Traveler. What a small blessing, for Cayde to frequent an establishment so close to the wall. Cael resists the impulse to look for it, orient by its place over the skyline.

The Traveler came, and the Ahamkara followed. _You are a dead thing made by a dead power in the shape of the dead; all you ever do is kill._ It doesn’t have to be true, Cael’s learned. There are other things, to do with their facsimile of life. There are _domestic pursuits,_ the love of families: losing people because they believe you are so much more, than something already dead. There are the moments you choose to save a member of your team, instead of chase your target. There are the moments you sit on a rooftop with the man you married, against every odd, and don’t make him talk about the man who killed his brother.

“Idris asked for the same story as your Hunters, before I left,” Cael says, offering the cup.

Lux withdraws his hand, warming it on the coffee instead. “He always knows what’s up.”

“I think that’s a kid thing, more than — an Idris thing. They pay attention.” 

“I didn’t pay that much attention, when I was his age.”

“But when you were older, when it was important.” Something in the universe put that alertness in him, before Cael picked him up outside of the Vault and refused to put him down. Cael didn’t learn it until he was almost ten; Lux doesn’t talk about Dareus enough to be sure — if it was before or after his mother died, how old he was when that happened. When Cael looks up at Lux’s face, watching him roll his lip under his teeth and stare at the coffee in his hands, he doesn’t know or care which it was.

Lux turns his head, releases his lip in a sigh, meets Cael’s eyes. “For all the good it did me, I suppose.” Cael sets his hands beneath Lux’s own, taking the cup and testing it with his own mouth. Too hot, still, but truly too bitter for his own tastes. He scrapes his tongue on the roof of his mouth, and Lux doesn’t smile, but Cael has his attention. For good or ill, and when has he ever cared which it was? What good would it do to ask, was any of it real at the bar? Is he one wrong word, one bad memory, away from a retreat?

Turnabout, but not really. They aren’t twenty anymore, and Idris notices everything.

Why did Cael ask him, before today? Should he shoot himself in the foot, see if Lux still chooses his Hunters in the morning? “How well do you remember that day,” he asks, sipping bitter coffee, burning away the words: _he didn’t save you because you’re a Guardian, he saved you because you’re his brother, and you have a life, you have_ me. 

The silence stretches, isn’t really silence — traffic, idling sparrows, opening and closing doors. Voices carrying up from the street, surprisingly good cheer — unless you knew the man they’ve come to mourn a year without. Cael won’t make him speak, tonight or any other night, but he will sit in three shadows, and he will need Lux to say something, even if it is just to ask that he go.

Lux blows a breath, puts a hand back on Cael’s knee. Softens whatever gave him pause with his lips against Cael’s brow, his head coming to rest against Cael’s own. His other hand takes the coffee back, sets it to one side. It ripples in the dark, moving with the air through the vent. “I don’t know how much I remember that mission, and how much I just remember the stories. There’s a long period of time back then, that was just — grief, and wanting you.”

Turnabout — not even. Just the ugly truth of what he’d done, what he refuses to regret. “And now?” Cael has had too much practice, to let any part of him shake while Lux is touching him. Too good to show how much it hurts, the idea of not being wanted. The slow drag of its claws over the last year, the wound that no amount of Light could heal. He’d built a life around people wanting him, he’d torn it down with Selena’s help — for this lynchpin to slip, for the past tense of a thing to make him feel this keenly —

He’s not as good as he used to be, or Lux remembers more than he claims. Cael aches to be touched, and Lux lifts a hand to his throat, smooths the edges of his hair against it. “Shh,” he murmurs, when Cael hasn’t said anything. Just let the claws drag on his mind, and his thoughts rush out of the wound. “Grief, but having you.” Lux’s voice cracks in a way Cael wants to, angling himself instinctively toward the sound. “I was. There was a part of me that thought you might leave. That it was what you wanted to talk about. I guess I underestimated your love of bossing me around.”

Maybe there is room, in the stubborn beat of his heart, for one regret. Cael lifts his hand, doesn’t — does put it over the hand at his throat. 

“Fuck you,” he tells them both, biting it off in the warmth between their mouths. His eyes cast light to hollows of Lux’s face, the dark circles, the bristles of new stubble. “I didn’t run from your grief, Lux. I’m not going to — I don’t run from the hard parts of you.” And what was never an argument, perhaps to its detriment, simmers in that truth. None of what Cael did, the first time they met, had anything to do with Lux — and that was the hurt of it. Carried here, spit up over the edge of a rooftop. Spoken aloud and told off, not just with words, but Cael’s hand on Lux’s hand, their faces close. Cael dragged out of the warmth of home to find Lux in the city, in the dark, and hold onto him.

They are the both of them — petty, insecure, and bad at using their words.

Lux smiles; Cael feels it more than he can see it, that wan and this close. “You like the hard parts of me.”

“I must; I’m not dropping you off this roof for that line.”

They’re breathing almost even, when the first Golden Gun lights up the night sky. Lux tilts his jaw for a kiss. “I like the hard parts of you too. Asshole.”

Cael shakes him a little, when Lux noses down into his collar. One hand in his hair, one arm slung over broad shoulders. “What are you wearing under this fancy coat,” he’s asked, Lux’s hands pushed inside, warming between his hips and a soft hem, pulled tight on a string.

“Your pajamas.”

His hands squeeze, fingers digging into the muscle of Cael’s sides. His mouth is hot and close, at the hollow of his throat. Lux is holding him, and laughing, with no witness but the illicit fireworks blurring for Cael’s watered eyes.


End file.
